The room treated this less as a dispute about electric vehicles than as a test of whether ministers can change the tax bargain after persuading people to switch. Yes prevailed decisively, propelled by distrust of mileage monitoring and the sense that a promised green incentive had acquired a new charge.
The floor’s most-respected Yes case called per-mile taxation “an additional Tax on those who live outside cities”, where driving is often less optional. Its privacy and bureaucracy concerns sharpened the point: estimating mileage, reconciling it at the MOT and exposing more information to the state sounded like a “bureaucratic nightmare”.
No voters made the opposite case in terms of use rather than administration: “Wasn't owning an EV meant to be cleaner and cheaper?” A more practical No voice argued that “A flat tax penalises those who use the roads least”, while Yes voters answered that simplicity, privacy and the broken promise mattered more than preserving a direct link between miles and payment.
That leaves the vote inside the wider argument over how the Treasury replaces fuel duty without making the transition to cleaner cars look like a bait-and-switch. The sharpest Yes formulation was blunt: “They sold green and then opened a new till”; No, by contrast, largely defended the principle that heavier road use should carry the larger bill.
The chamber did not reject EV taxation so much as reject being measured to pay for it.
37 Opinions
We were told to go green, and now we’re getting punished for driving the cars they begged us to buy. Pay-per-mile is just a penalty on anyone who has to drive to work or lives outside London where buses don't exist. Guessing your miles in advance and getting the DVLA to check your dashboard every year is a bureaucratic nightmare
A per mile cost is probably An additional Tax on those who live outside cities. Any eVED needs to be lower than a car tax or drawn from the tax already paid on electricity usage when charging. This in turn will reward those who invest in home solar energy
Wasn't owning an EV meant to be cleaner and cheaper? I can't see how putting a flat rate tax on all vehicles is going to increase to sale of EVs. Surely putting a tax on the amount of electricity used to drive the EV, is better, as is the tax on petrol and diesel.
All cars should be taxed equally, EVs should have higher insurance as they often explode and the effects of EMFs are unknown. Also all car tax should be spent on roads & related issues.
Another day, another tax proposal. Or even two tax proposals. Tiring. As could not vote none, second seems to be easier and cheaper to collect, not allowing invigilation and control machine to expand further.
This is entirely unfair and defeats the object of persuading people to use EVs
A flat tax penalises those who use the roads least, which is clearly unfair. Why should someone who, for example, only drives 2000 miles per year be charged the same as someone who drives 100000 miles. The argument that a flat rate is administratively simpler & cheaper is short termism. The technology to charge per mile would rapidly evolve if it’s not already available
A flat tax is massively more efficient on an administrative level, freeing up more resources in HMRC for other tasks e.g. cracking down on tax evasion schemes
This is a tangent to the question. Let's assume autonomous driving remains blocked in the UK for the foreseeable future. It will be sold as a safety concern, but accidents-per-mile stats don't support that. It will be to protect jobs. So you are driving around in a giant computer that monitors every single thing you do with the controls. How many different fees, fines and penalties do you think they can data-mine from that?
How about neither? What are they even taxing for? Roads are supposed to be paid for by council tax so what now